As a kid with Irish-Catholic roots, he played parking-lot football with his buddies imagining he was Notre Dame. But the Bethlehem man never had the means to get there, and while he grew up rooting for the Irish, he went to the College of Saint Rose. A fine school, he says, but not the place he chose to propose to his wife. That was the Grotto on a picturesque campus in South Bend, Ind., where the gold dome kisses the sky.

The first time Flanagan went there on a bus trip with the Notre Dame Club of Northeastern New York, he "just wanted to grab one of the students walking by and shake them and say, 'Do you know how lucky you are to be a student of the University of Notre Dame?' If I were to envision heaven, that's what I'd envision it like."

Alumni refer to fans like Flanagan — a man who's made a tradition of watching "Rudy" every Friday night on game weekends — as "subway alumni," a term dating back to the first half of the 20th century, when New Yorkers would take the subway to see Notre Dame play Army at Yankee Stadium.

There are lots of them — the fighting Irishman shows up everywhere from Cleveland to Japan.

But that's what happens at big schools with long-standing tradition and appeal like Notre Dame. Besides having a football stadium that packs in crowds of 80,000, Notre Dame also carries a mystique. They don't let just anyone who can reel in a wobbly pass with one hand touch the "Play Like a Champion" sign. Any alum — and Irish-lovers like Flanagan — can tell you that this season, Notre Dame has the No. 1 football team and ranks No. 1 in athlete graduation rate. (It has been the top college for graduating athletes in all sports — 99 percent — for six consecutive years). And they've got Knute Rockne, the Gipper and, of course, Rudy.

"My kids would not say I was a sports rah-rah for Notre Dame, but I've always felt it's an excellent education," says Rosemary (Abowd) Schwendler, who remembers her father watching Notre Dame-Pittsburgh upstairs during her daughter's baptism party when she was crazy enough to schedule it during a game. He was an alum, and Schwendler — who played the glockenspiel in the marching band, so she's been to a few bowl games herself — is among the nine of his 12 kids who followed him in the tradition. Now Schwendler's daughter left Glenville behind to study marketing and sustainability there.

"It's something that gathered family," Schwendler says about the days growing up in Detroit when her family would make the trip to South Bend to tailgate. "It was certainly a place where you felt like a family, and the concept of the Notre Dame family is not a tagline or a marketing pitch. It's real, and it exists out here."

When Schwendler, a 1981 grad, wasn't texting her siblings about Manti Te'o's awesomeness this season, she was watching the games with her Capital Region Notre Dame family. The Notre Dame Club of Northeastern New York began the season drawing about 30 supporters to "game watches" at local restaurants and bars, and ended it attracting crowds of up to 75 as the season heated up. About 100 to 150 Irish fans and alumni are active members of the club, which stretches from the Canadian border to Poughkeepsie. And carrying on the Notre Dame tradition of service, they hold fundraisers for organizations such as Mercy House and participate in community service projects.

And that's why Flanagan, a teacher who earned his bachelor's and master's degrees elsewhere, has a license plate that says "GCND" (God, country and Notre Dame).

"It's much more than football," he says. "It's just encompassing, and it's a lifestyle really."

But, Touchdown Jesus, the first national football title since 1988 would be nice, too.